Murder, My Love

Tip of the Fedora

Although the intent here has not been to create an historical mystery novel, my approach does attempt to place each of these collaborations in the context of when Mickey Spillane wrote the material I worked from, and where in Mike Hammer’s life the tale occurs.

(By the way, do not be tempted to do the math about how old Mike Hammer, Velda and Pat Chambers are in the novels set from the 1980s through the early twenty-first century. Mike Hammer ages, but not in the same way as the rest of us. He has more wiggle room than we do.)

To provide a background at least somewhat consistent with reality, I leaned upon research, most of it on the Internet. The major articles I used for this purpose in Murder, My Love are: “How Brooklyn Got Its Groove Back” by Kay S. Hymowitz, City Journal, Autumn 2011; “Singing a Sad Song for Their Piano Bar” by Anthony Ramirez, New York Times, July 19 2007; “The Old Duplex” in Vanishing New York (Dey Street Books, 2017) by Jeremiah Moss; “Roberta Flack Price Chops Co-Op at the Legendary Dakota Building in New York City,” Variety, January 19, 2017; “Visiting Caffe Reggio” by Jen Carlson, December 8, 2014, Gothamist website; and “Secrets of the Flatiron Building” by Michelle Young, November 24, 1918, New York News. Additionally, I referred to the book “21: the Life and Times of New York’s Favorite Club (1975) by Marilyn Kaytor.

My thanks to publisher Nick Landau and his editorial staff at Titan Books, including Ella Chappell and Davi Lancett, for continuing to pursue what has been termed the Mickey Spillane Legacy Project. The wide and warm response to the Spillane Centenary publications in 2018 and ’19 has been gratifying to those of us who consider the writer (he abhorred the term “author”) one of the major figures of tough crime and mystery fiction.

Toward that end, Jane Spillane — Mrs. Mickey Spillane — has made all of this possible. And Mrs. Max Allan Collins — writer Barbara Collins — has served as my in-house editor, cheerleader, and critic, making several plot suggestions along the way.

Finally, my longtime friend and agent Dominick Abel continues to be indispensable where his clients Mickey and Max are concerned.